You missed, as far as I can tell, one key point: by getting a bunch of well-educated kids, many of whom are likely going to end up in the progressive wing of the Democrats, to do something like this…
You’re going to create a medium-sized constellation of driven people within the coalition who support fixing policing but also have an understanding of the realities, sympathy for the people who do the job, and at least a decent idea of what reforms can and can’t work.
This is something that the progressive left just clearly does not have at present.
TL;DR: the important mechanism will be to change the progressive movement, not the police.
I think that was definitely on Matt's radar in this piece -- indeed, it struck me as one of the central benefits Matt was touting:
"perhaps develop more moderate, meliorist views of viable approaches to change."
"a corps of reformers who have law enforcement credibility and perhaps a more realistic perspective than a lot of what’s on offer today"
"creating a corps of reformers who have the credibility of former classroom teachers — while also recognizing that the teachers themselves have some important and valid insights. And my hope would be that we could generate some similar effects in the policing space."
Combined with Matt's point that "Once you get past the fantasy that we can wish policing away or “reimagine” public safety in a way that doesn’t involve guys with uniforms and guns, you’re left with the fact that the policing status quo is bad and also hard to change." I would say that this point of view isn't so much an implicit as an explicit goal of Matt's proposal.
As I say below, a pair of oblique references and several even more oblique comments inviting comparison is pretty indirect compared to what Matt normally says.
The reality is that, as much as the status quo of policing in the US requires considerable reform, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has no bloody clue what it's doing and is making things steadily (or rapidly, lol) worse, disproportionately harming the vulnerable folks about whom it claims to care most.
The single most important effect of such a program on the current challenges we face will be to puncture the bubble in which well-educated young people dwell on these issues by presenting a great number of them with peers and friends who have "seen the elephant."
The second-most important would hopefully be to thread folks from these backgrounds within police forces in quantity enough that they start to impact, on their own and without further reforms, the culture of impunity and apartness which has taken root within many organizations.
TL;DR: Bubbles bad, for both police and would-be reformers, and Matt understands this. He is normally roughly as direct in his hippy-punching as he is in his square-punching, but pulled a lot of former here.
Does anyone know the gender makeup for TFA? I tried to find it, but while they have a bunch of diversity info on the website, I can't actually find that breakdown. I ask, because my initial thought was that TFA is a great line to put on your resume if your going to the non profit world which is ~75% women. Teaching is about ~75% women and there are some strong similarities in peer groups. In contrast, police are currently ~13% women and 87% men. I think a program to balance that number would be good, but I think a Police for America would face significant challenges in a successful launch because of that difference.
Entirely anecdotal, but 8/10 people I remembered off the top of my head who did TFA from my class at UCLA are male. At least 5 are now working in tech, 1 in consulting, and another is a VP at a major entertainment firm. It appealed to people who didn’t really know what they wanted to do but, unlike me, did not stupidly choose law school to delay actually figuring it out.
What do you think keeps women out of policing? Relatedly, it would be interesting to know if the countries whose police culture the left wants to emulate are also gender imbalanced wrt police forces.
Women in law enforcement face the same problems as women in any other field where promotion is based on physical performance. This becomes further complicated by the fact that arrests and other physical altercations involving female officers and male suspects will escalate more quickly than male-only encounters given the lack of alternatives to aggressive or even lethal force. Particularly in today's law enforcement environment in which cameras are ubiquitous, female officers are being setup for failure unless they can quickly be reassigned to roles that don't require physical confrontations with violent suspects.
Is policing based on physical performance? Seems like there's a lot more that goes into policing: administrative skills, communication, critical thinking, observation, memorization, bravery, PR, good driving, conscientiousness, projecting credibility, respectfulness, and empathy, etc. And all the research indicates that encounters with women officers are LESS likely to escalate than with men. Women officers generally have fewer excessive use of force complaints against women, and aren't sued as often as men officers.
Beyond what Matthew A mentions - I think you run into the uncomfortable feeling of being a noticeable minority. I don't have the data to back this up, but I suspect that large urban forces are significantly higher than 13%, but that smaller departments are often likely to be all men. Which is unfortunate IMO. From personal experience, I've worked on all male teams before, and adding women brings both a diversity of perspective and experience while also tamping down some of the excessive stupidity that men can display.
We can also compare to the US when there were fewer women police officers. I can't find the link now but from what I remember, increasing gender diversity lead to reductions in homicides and domestic violence through people feeling more comfortable reporting certain crimes to women.
That's fair, and though I'd characterize the audience for the policy as progressives, the audience for this article is more mixed/moderate. But splitting hairs.
Counterpoint: a TFA model for policing could be a really really bad idea! TFA gives "elite" grads a crash course over the summer in teaching instruction and then throws them into the high poverty areas. Failures in teaching are relatively low profile, while an analogous policing failure would be all over the news. It's pretty easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story. And policing probably relies a bit more on camaraderie than teaching does (not that teaching doesn't, but you're not in a classroom with another teacher all day long). What happens when the existing police officers start hanging the PFA kids out to dry? Again, pretty easy to imagine.
I don’t find it “easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad shooting a minority at a traffic stop”—instead, I find it very hard to believe any Yale grad would touch such a program with a ten foot pole. It’s one thing to get idealistic young people to try teaching, which means interacting with children—most people like kids—and quite another to get them to volunteer for the “mean streets” interacting with possible criminals. Policing is seen (unfortunately) as a job for tough guys, working class military veterans, maybe someone with an associate’s degree in criminal justice. I think a more promising path may be to recruit among working class minorities coming out of high school, offer them free college in exchange for going into policing, somewhat like we do with military recruiting.
Realistically, a program like this would be aiming for grads of Regional State University, not Yale. Which is fine. For Teach for America, to make a difference you needed to attract grads of prestigious schools, as the baseline teacher *already* goes to RSU. But for police, RSU grads would represent just as large an improvement over baseline.
I think you’re all over-stereotyping them! Sure there are a bunch who are like that (and you see some of them down the line in the public eye creating this misimpression), but there are so so many more who have no such plans or ambitions whatsoever. Ivy League schools are part of real life, not some school version of “succession” or what have you.
Not only is the military held in higher esteem than the police -- cops don't get to board airplanes early -- but going into the armed forces as an officer after ROTC is just more prestigious than starting as a rookie cop.
I think you’re over generalizing about Ivy League students. Some of them would be open to it. At the same time however, there is no particular mystique about them, and I don’t think they’re likely to do a better or worse job than candidates from other selective colleges.
Actually I don't think this would have a lot of appeal to students at Whatever State U, either, unless they were the sort (the rare sort) already interested in police work. It's not a stretch to get liberal arts grads interested in teaching, it's a huge stretch to bring them over to law enforcement. BTW, I think we very much need to get people who wouldn't normally think of entering law enforcement to consider it as a career if we are ever to have serious reform away from the current paramilitary model.
Progress creates new problems. One great thing that has continually improved for people is we have more career options. But the downside is it does lead to significant personality segregation by profession.
Both conservatives and liberals have organically self-segregated into certain professions. And I don't think this is a great development.
I agree with you on who this program should target. But the program would have to do an exceptional job, as the military usually has, of turning knuckleheads into decent, accountable young people.
"It's pretty easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story."
Now I'm picturing Milan as Dirty Harry:
I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Now to tell you the truth, I've forgotten myself in all this excitement. So I prepared a graphic visualization displaying information from the area's "Shot Spotter" system and it clearly shows only five shots whose audio signature matched that of a .44 Magnum in the past 24 hours, so you've gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel like I have sufficient data to make an informed decision?" Well, do ya', punk?
“a crash course over the summer in teaching instruction”
Is this very different from the status quo of police academies?
“What happens when the existing police officers start hanging the PFA kids out to dry?”
This is a scary problem with the idea, I agree. But as far as I can tell, “the biggest problem with police reform is the police staff” is a problem for every other potential avenue of change, too.
No disagreement from me on this. My point (which could've used more articulation) is that TFA's strategy is centered around good publicity and having their alums in positions of influence. It's savvy for sure, but there's still a lot of contention about outcomes which Matt glosses over a bit. All of the issues with TFA would be magnified in a policing model, where the employees carry guns and all of the existing employees would be significantly more hostile to being "disrupted."
And to briefly defend existing police officers a bit. The cultural animosity is a two way street.
I'm equally concerned the UCLA grad will say talking to the Walgreens cashier about a shoplifter is beneath me. The dumb brutes can do it as I should be focusing on the cognitively demanding police tasks that are too complicated for you.
I think the better opportunity is figuring out how to diversify police forces. The attraction of policing is it’s a relatively high paying job for someone without educational credentials, and it’s culturally attractive to do it in certain circles. Interestingly even high crime cities like Detroit with diverse police forces seemed to weather 2020 much better than lower crime cities policed entirely by white exurban Trump voters (Minneapolis).
Also like it or not, affluent suburbanite parents think of policing as dangerous even if they might be liberal police critics. They won’t let their kids become police.
Not a panacea but I think it’s the absolute minimum for any chance at success. As someone who has lived in both NYC and Minneapolis, the relatively diverse NYPD isn’t perfect but at least seemed somewhat respected. Minneapolis PD (composed almost entirely of exurban white Trump voters) is hated by everyone who lives in the city. And while murders in NYC increased in 2021, they lost about a decade of progress while Minneapolis had record murder rates
"even high crime cities like Detroit with diverse police forces seemed to weather 2020 much better than lower crime cities policed"
There's a very simple explanation for this - most of the energy for disruptive protests and clashes with police came from white liberal media bubbles. If you look up maps of where BLM protests happened, it tracks big city progressive of whatever race, not % population of Black people or other minorities.
A city like Detroit has relatively few liberal progressive. Very progressive, very white cities like Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis did way worse than cities like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas or New Orleans. And the existing racial polarization of the South (whites there vote way more for the GOP) means that whites on those police forces would have been much more Trump-voting than whites on the Minneapolis police force.
Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis have pretty similar demographic histories that I think explain some of the similarly dysfunctional situations in the three. (Boston is a pretty blue city and didn't have a CHAZ) It'd be fun to read a longer article exploring that.
Good point. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that it's a deterministic relationship. there are many local factors and some randomness - Ferguson isn't a White Liberal bastion either.
But still, I do think it's the trend. In earlier eras of racial unrest the flash points where majority Black areas like urban Detroit and Cleveland, Watts and South Central LA etc...
But the flash points in this round were more often places like Kenosha. There were no riots that I'm aware of and relatively few protests in Mobile, Selma or New Orleans, and I think that really says something about where the outrage was coming from.
How does Philly track this? Its demographics are more like NYC than Minneapolis but the results seem closer to the latter at the moment.
We're obviously no Portland, and our police force is much more "homegrown" than in Minneapolis, but it seems that we have generated the same problem as those two: a significant fraction of our police force is unwilling to do its job (the occupying army fanboys), another significant fraction feels unable (the ones who feel no one has their back on dirty necessities), and the remainder are too exhausted (the ones who are trying anyway).
Our current dirt-bike and ATV fiasco is pretty indicative: these idiots have killed 2 pedestrians YTD, and apparently last year killed 5-6. But it's approaching 100% certain that any measures able to get them off the street will cause at least some to suffer severe and potentially lethal accidents, and the police clearly have *no* confidence that that reality is well-understood by the citizenry, the city government, or the DA's office.
So they're left to continue endangering themselves and others, because no one will tolerate the very marginal uptick in danger which would occur if we made a real effort to bring them to heel.
I suspect the endgame, in a few years' time, when everyone is well and truly sick of this, will be that an Adams-esque mayoral candidate comes to office on a platform of "I don't care if a few of them get killed, we're getting them off the streets permanently."
Hopefully that person turns out to be less of a lazy, loafer-type than Adams himself.
I dunno. Philly actually crossed my mind as I was writing my prior comment because it seemed like a particularly dysfunctional outlier, and I don't even know where to place it on the spectrum of liberal or bad police relations. But it's a city I'm fairly oblivious to and (no offense) I've actively avoided my entire life, lol.
What is going on there with ATVs? Who is riding them? Cops or citizens? I came across something a little similar that might be happening in LA, in this video the tour guide to Compton says they get 500-1000 friends together and ride motorbikes and call it a "takeover" and he says the police used to pull them over and "bother them and take their shit" but now they do nothing:
Lol, your entire life was spent between a 5-hour drive and a 5-hour plane trip away, did it really require significant active avoidance?
I didn't set foot in Pittsburgh until a few years ago, and I'm in my 30's.
Anywho, it's pretty much as you describe in LA; bunch of people decide to be stupid together and the city government lacks any willingness to enforce the law, so lots of them get hurt and occasionally they manage to kill someone else.
Maybe diversifying police departments (forcibly via quotas?) would be more effective than MY's idea. Maybe.
But I think MY's idea would be relatively easy for the public to swallow. If we go the diversity-quota route, prepare to wait decades for widespread implementation.
(And that pessimism is based on public opinion alone. Another bottleneck might be a lack of non-white jobseekers.)
I don't know that the average person, of any race, cares about these kinds of issues as much as the average liberal does, though. Are you more worried about getting pulled over by a Black or Hispanic or Asian cop than a White one? I'm not. I know plenty of people do think that way, but it's not a habit of thought that should be encouraged since it's relatively low down the scale of things that can impact an interaction with a police officer.
Assuming we actually train these kids the same way we do other police (which is, yes, too short, but that's obviously where we would start):
I would assume that the narrative for "20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story" would look almost identical to how it does today with any police, if it happens in the first year. But the whole point of the exercise, at least from my perspective, is to pierce the bubble in which the chattering classes exist when it comes to policing.
If the program survives, what happens in 10 or 20 years when most college graduates know someone who went and did police work for 2-3 years and a third know someone who made it into a life-long career/vocation, like is currently true for TFA? Can the university-educated core of the progressive movement maintain its current delusions about the nature of police work in the US and the value it does/doesn't bring to society?
I actually think progressives learning more about policing first-hand would be a great benefit to our coalition.
A lot of progressives view police officers the way conservatives view academics: through a distorted lens.
Since both are extremely under-represented, non-particularly interested in it, and pre-disposed to view them negatively, absurd stereotypes flourish.
I've met a lot of normal liberals who call police forces stormtroopers and if you're actually familiar with Nazi troopers that is no less outlandish than conservatives who call academics Leninists/.
Coming at this from a San Francisco perspective, I don't see how this would solve my city's problems.
We have a crime and homelessness problem because:
- the city (and state) chooses not to prosecute most small-ish theft
- drug use isn't prosecuted
As a result, people come to SF from around the country because the weather is nice and they can live in a tent, steal small things for money, and use that cash for drugs, all with relatively little trouble.
I don't think the situation is bad because the cops aren't smart enough.
It's the politicians and policy-makers not understanding the consequences of what they're doing.
I thought the idea that homeless people come from all over the country to California because of the weather and liberal values has been mostly debunked. Instead, most homeless people come from the communities where they live and the main driver is high housing costs.
From what I know, the "it's debunked" view is more correct on the regional level. So you might be right about California as a whole.
But on the more local level, local policies and policing are much more impactful. It's self-evident that the 5,000 people on LA's skid row, for example, originally came from somewhere else, even if that somewhere is just somewhere in LA.
So why are they concentrated there and not somewhere else in LA? That's where the local policies come in. SF is a much smaller city than LA and has policies that concentrate the high-crime homeless locally.
So you're right, most probably didn't come from Ohio to smash windows in Haight-Ashbury. But David R's reasons are good explanations for why so many disruptive homeless live in SF and not in Mountain View or Victorville.
I think it’s pretty natural that homeless people within a metro area would congregate in dense urban environments in which services, public transit, etc are available and not in sparsely populated suburbs where there’s no foot traffic, few buses, and few public amenities. So that may explain more why homeless people congregate more in downtown SD than in La Jolla, or in Miami than in Palm Beach, or in SF rather than Mountain View.
Sure but, at least in the areas I'm familiar with (Los Angeles, for example) the homeless will sometimes be forcibly removed from a less tolerant area and bussed to a more tolerant area. All the things about amenities can be true, also, but those big sweeps are pretty massive needle-movers.
Just as an anecdote on the off-chance that you're familiar with the area, but Pasadena, CA, had plenty of homeless services when I lived there, but the small number of homeless were fairly off-the-radar. If I was homeless I'd far prefer there to the jungles of skid row or East Hollywood, but the latter places are where they ended up.
I think the high-housing costs thing had been debunked. At least you may be talking about 2 different populations. The vast majority of people shitting on the sidewalk and committing petty thefts are mentally I’ll and/or are chronic drug users who aren’t able to hold down jobs or pay rent...there is a subset of people between jobs / living in their cars / temporarily down on their luck affected by high housing costs...the temporarily homeless crowd. But they’re a small share of the overall numbers.
And when it comes to housing costs - policies in my state (OR) are so unfriendly to landlords, it’s no surprise there’s a housing shortage. If you have no recourse against tenants who are a high risk for not paying rent or damaging your property, you’re not going to take on renters.
It would be good if people claiming things have been debunked cited some data, otherwise you get situations like this where two people with opposing views both claim the other's have been debunked.
"... San Francisco’s mild climate alone can’t explain why it has more homeless people per capita than Miami or Houston. But as the graph above shows, housing prices do explain about 75% of the difference between SF and those two cities. "
Drug use and mental health problems are both a cause and effect of homelessness. Most of the country has seen a decline in homelessness over the last ten years. Every place that has seen an increase is a place where housing costs have skyrocketed. Seems like an open and shut case to me.
The correlation seems muddy to me. When I look at housing cost curves, they look almost identical in SF, Portland, Las Vegas, Houston, eg - yet only Portland and San Francisco have seen increases . Then a city with (relatively) modest housing price growth like Albuquerque has seen their homeless population triple in the last 2 years.
Subsidized housing will definitely help a portion of people...I just think it’s a multidimensional problem. Eg here’s a complicated factor: eviction moratoriums put in place for the pandemic are now expiring, causing homeless numbers to spike in some places... that’s bad in the short term, but probably *good* in the long term as it will encourage property owners and investors to put more property up for rent.
Houston appears to have tackled homelessness in a more direct way than those other cities and is an outlier. Nevada on the other hand has had one of the most rapid growths in homelessness in the country. They might do more to kick people out of Vegas, but all that does is shuffle them to other nearby areas.
Since we were talking about the police/maintaining the peace - I was referring specifically to the vast majority of shoplifters and sidewalk shitters as being addicts/mentally ill. Not necessarily the vast majority of all homeless.
And your study mentions mentally ill - not sure if it includes drug and alcohol addiction.
The ‘housing cost’ argument is fine - it doesn’t help to have a lack of cheap housing. But focusing on housing to the exclusion of other factors - which the ‘housing first’ crowd seems to want to do - seems like a dodge... they want me to believe that the median homeless person is just an average stable person who couldn’t afford rent...so instead of crashing on a friends couch or moving to a cheaper town or getting a roommate, they decided to live in a trash heap in the park and crap on your front porch and scream nonsense at passers-by...No, I don’t think so.
Homelessness is a function of housing prices AND mental Illness and addiction and local policy enforcement (or lack thereof) and climate and lack of a safety net and probably some other stuff...
FWIW - in 2019 the San Francisco health department estimated that 50% of their homeless population (sheltered and unsheltered) suffered from BOTH mental health and substance abuse issues, with another 5-10% being either/or. Below is a 2019 LA Times article and attached UCLA study saying incidence of addiction and mental illness among LA’s homeless population is between 70% and 80%. They touch on reasons why numbers are often understated (self-reporting is unreliable, flaws in how govt collects data - a common source for researchers, and the bias of homeless advocates to de-emphasize anything that takes away from the homeless-as-victim narrative.) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless-population-mental-illness-disability
But I’m with you - let’s subsidize housing, but let’s also not pretend mental illness and addiction aren’t major factors too. And let’s not pretend we can solve the problem without 1) rebuilding mental health facilities and services 2) funding more addiction services, AND just as important 3) expecting that slice of addicted/mentally ill recipients of subsidized housing - whether it’s 25% or 80% - to seek and maintain treatment for their issues and 4) not tolerating city destroying behavior - whether you’re homeless or homeful - you get arrested if you shit/shoot up on the sidewalk, threaten people/behave violently, steal things, disturb the peace, etc. It’s not ‘housing first’ - it’s more like an ‘all of the above’ approach.
The Seattle Times has a series on homelessness and in one of their articles, they mentioned that about 30% of all the homeless people living on the street have hoarding disorder, which partly explains why there are often giant piles of trash next to a homeless person's tent. I don't know if it's usually considered a serious mental illness, but that's an incredibly high rate just for one mental illness.
Having hoarding disorder also makes it difficult for a person to move into subsidized housing because they may not be able to bring all their stuff with them, but it also means they're more likely to get evicted over safety issues. They may also leave housing because they accumulate more stuff than they can keep. Homeless people with hoarding disorder probably need much more than just housing. On the other hand, housing first probably solves the problem for a lot homeless single mothers.
I agree almost completely. I say almost because I think housing is the primary cause of homelessness. The correlation between prices and rate of homelessness is just too high for it to be otherwise.
But drug addiction, anti-social behavior and mental illness are exacerbating factors and it's tiresome when otherwise sharp writers and analysts like Yglesias pretend like they are not a part of the equation.
But what is the % breakdown of mentally ill between the highly visible "public nuisance" homeless and quietly struggling borderline-invisible homeless?
There are a lot of "invisible" homeless -- folks who lost their job, can't make the rent, and are living in their cars or crashing on couches. These folks aren't a crime problem. The visible homeless, the ones hanging out on the street, I argue are much more likely to be mentally ill or have drug problems.
The study you cite notes this and, I might add, says that the 25% is "at a minimum" and that 45% had some level of mental illness.
I have become increasingly skeptical of the research around homelessness, particularly around people who are visibly homeless in many cases the research is clearly partisan or the conclusions are obviously absurd.
For instance, here in Seattle we were assured that homeless encampments absolutely did not lead to more crime and anyone who believes that is watching too much Sinclair media. Then the city released data on 911 calls. Almost 1/5 calls for guns shots/someone shot were related to homeless encampments.
My best guess is that this research is being conducted by people with a partisan agenda.
I regularly read the homicide report feature from the LA Times. No reason other than I'm very interested in crime and I guess I'm just a morbid guy. Homeless people are a hugely disprorportionate source of both victims and perpetrators in LA
What's weird is that activists who claim to care about homeless people wave aside the crime problem. If they really want to improve the lives of people in these encampments, an important place to start is to reduce the amount of crime, particularly violent crime in these encampments.
If the cost of housing drove people onto the street, why would you choose to live on the sidewalk in an expensive neighborhood in SF when apartments that are less than 1/2 the price are available a bus ride away?
How many middle-class people have tolerated 1-hour commutes in order to get a cheaper place?
When you see someone on the street, do you think it's because they decided "This is better than the bus ride"?
When you get kicked out of your rental because you don't have the money to pay rent then you also don't have the money for first and last months rent somewhere else. Homeless people live near where they can get services (like a mission) or near transit centers that can move them around. If you are actually curious (instead of just wanting to one-up people on the internet) you can read lots of articles that describe how people become homeless and how they get by once that happens. There is no one reason that people become homeless, it's always a bunch of reasons. Most grew up around abuse and drugs, but nowhere near all of them. Many have mental health disorders, but not all of them. It's a complex problem that requires complex solutions, but it's been proven beyond reasonable doubt by lots of different economists that high housing costs make the problem much worse. Matt has written on the subject many times, feel free to go back and read them.
There are definitely some homeless people that move around the country, and who choose to go to California for the weather. But there are plenty of places with great weather that have declining homeless populations, and one the biggest explosions in homelessness has been in NYC which obviously does not have great weather at all. So yes, this is all about housing costs. But I would be careful about saying that homeless people don't move to California.
Among homeless people >24 years old, 70% have lived in LA county over 20 years, with only around 6% having arrived within the past year. 70% were last stably housed in LA county with another 10% last being stable housed elsewhere in California.
Among homeless youths (age 18 to 24), there is a greater proportion of recent transplants. However, still 67% were last stably housed in LA County, and still more elsewhere in California.
We don’t know what percentage of homeless transplants moved there for the weather. And sure it does seem that some wanderers do indeed exist, but they are by no means the majority of even major drivers of homelessness in LA.
However, what is clear is that homelessness in California is not primarily driven by transplants moving there, whether for the weather or for liberal policies or any other reason. Granted this doesn’t explain dynamics within different areas within LA county…
A couple of other dimensions that I would be curious about in terms of their impact behind the scenes - 1) it’s hard to get a good picture of state-by-state changes to the various safety nets that keep people afloat...be it housing subsidies, beds at inpatient psychiatric facilities, welfare, drug treatment programs etc. If people teetering on the edge lose access to food stamps, or some other support service they had formerly relied on, that could send them into a spiral that leads to the street. 2) changes in drug environment - the advent of fentanyl, oxy, spread of meth, the loosening of drug laws, the stand-down by police after George Floyd etc
I'm perhaps the most intense criminal justice reform person I know, but the "stand around and watch the guy ransacking the CVS" thing is the most derangedly stupid shit I've ever seen. No functional version of the state can allow that.
This sounds like the same attitude you usually hear from hard-left folks: "If you're not going to solve Problem X completely, then I'm not interested in making things somewhat better. The only acceptable solution is to adopt my entire worldview on this."
Perhaps a progressive cohort that gets involved more in every day policing would be able to convince other reformers to take a more realistic stance on those policy issues. That is why Matt made the point about how TFA experience shifts the views of reformers.
I was about to make a similar comment. A knock-on effect would ideally involve changing the progressive consensus around what the realities on the ground are as well as realistic solutions.
It seems plausible that not prosecuting shoplifting and drug use is the explanation for a surge in shoplifting and drug use. It seems less plausible that it would be behind a rise in other crimes.
And to add as a bleeding heart, the existence of the punishment matters much more than the harshness of the punishment.
The SF shoplifting problem, which as someone who lives here is subjectively a major problem from my perspective, is primarily due to total non-enforcementy.
I agree with David R that Matt's proposal doesn't target the problems in SF. But it seems to me the problems David is raising are basically policy and public health problems, not policing problems.
So long as Matt's proposal doesn't have negative impact on the homeless/drug/mental illness issues in SF (which it doesn't seem to), I don't think the fact that it doesn't address those problems is a flaw.
You missed, as far as I can tell, one key point: by getting a bunch of well-educated kids, many of whom are likely going to end up in the progressive wing of the Democrats, to do something like this…
You’re going to create a medium-sized constellation of driven people within the coalition who support fixing policing but also have an understanding of the realities, sympathy for the people who do the job, and at least a decent idea of what reforms can and can’t work.
This is something that the progressive left just clearly does not have at present.
TL;DR: the important mechanism will be to change the progressive movement, not the police.
I think that was definitely on Matt's radar in this piece -- indeed, it struck me as one of the central benefits Matt was touting:
"perhaps develop more moderate, meliorist views of viable approaches to change."
"a corps of reformers who have law enforcement credibility and perhaps a more realistic perspective than a lot of what’s on offer today"
"creating a corps of reformers who have the credibility of former classroom teachers — while also recognizing that the teachers themselves have some important and valid insights. And my hope would be that we could generate some similar effects in the policing space."
Combined with Matt's point that "Once you get past the fantasy that we can wish policing away or “reimagine” public safety in a way that doesn’t involve guys with uniforms and guns, you’re left with the fact that the policing status quo is bad and also hard to change." I would say that this point of view isn't so much an implicit as an explicit goal of Matt's proposal.
As I say below, a pair of oblique references and several even more oblique comments inviting comparison is pretty indirect compared to what Matt normally says.
The reality is that, as much as the status quo of policing in the US requires considerable reform, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has no bloody clue what it's doing and is making things steadily (or rapidly, lol) worse, disproportionately harming the vulnerable folks about whom it claims to care most.
The single most important effect of such a program on the current challenges we face will be to puncture the bubble in which well-educated young people dwell on these issues by presenting a great number of them with peers and friends who have "seen the elephant."
The second-most important would hopefully be to thread folks from these backgrounds within police forces in quantity enough that they start to impact, on their own and without further reforms, the culture of impunity and apartness which has taken root within many organizations.
TL;DR: Bubbles bad, for both police and would-be reformers, and Matt understands this. He is normally roughly as direct in his hippy-punching as he is in his square-punching, but pulled a lot of former here.
Yes! (The long and comprehensive version of my response)
Does anyone know the gender makeup for TFA? I tried to find it, but while they have a bunch of diversity info on the website, I can't actually find that breakdown. I ask, because my initial thought was that TFA is a great line to put on your resume if your going to the non profit world which is ~75% women. Teaching is about ~75% women and there are some strong similarities in peer groups. In contrast, police are currently ~13% women and 87% men. I think a program to balance that number would be good, but I think a Police for America would face significant challenges in a successful launch because of that difference.
Entirely anecdotal, but 8/10 people I remembered off the top of my head who did TFA from my class at UCLA are male. At least 5 are now working in tech, 1 in consulting, and another is a VP at a major entertainment firm. It appealed to people who didn’t really know what they wanted to do but, unlike me, did not stupidly choose law school to delay actually figuring it out.
What do you think keeps women out of policing? Relatedly, it would be interesting to know if the countries whose police culture the left wants to emulate are also gender imbalanced wrt police forces.
Women in law enforcement face the same problems as women in any other field where promotion is based on physical performance. This becomes further complicated by the fact that arrests and other physical altercations involving female officers and male suspects will escalate more quickly than male-only encounters given the lack of alternatives to aggressive or even lethal force. Particularly in today's law enforcement environment in which cameras are ubiquitous, female officers are being setup for failure unless they can quickly be reassigned to roles that don't require physical confrontations with violent suspects.
Is policing based on physical performance? Seems like there's a lot more that goes into policing: administrative skills, communication, critical thinking, observation, memorization, bravery, PR, good driving, conscientiousness, projecting credibility, respectfulness, and empathy, etc. And all the research indicates that encounters with women officers are LESS likely to escalate than with men. Women officers generally have fewer excessive use of force complaints against women, and aren't sued as often as men officers.
Beyond what Matthew A mentions - I think you run into the uncomfortable feeling of being a noticeable minority. I don't have the data to back this up, but I suspect that large urban forces are significantly higher than 13%, but that smaller departments are often likely to be all men. Which is unfortunate IMO. From personal experience, I've worked on all male teams before, and adding women brings both a diversity of perspective and experience while also tamping down some of the excessive stupidity that men can display.
Being smaller and weaker Tham most of the people they might have to subdue.
Also probably can't run as fast especially carrying weight
We can also compare to the US when there were fewer women police officers. I can't find the link now but from what I remember, increasing gender diversity lead to reductions in homicides and domestic violence through people feeling more comfortable reporting certain crimes to women.
I don't think it's statistically that different from the gender make-up of teachers in general
source: TFA alum/employee
I agree, and I believe so did the article. Last paragraph before mentioning Wendy Kopp.
He touches the idea obliquely twice, but I think he is shying away from hippy-punching on this one because the hippies are the intended audience.
That's fair, and though I'd characterize the audience for the policy as progressives, the audience for this article is more mixed/moderate. But splitting hairs.
Counterpoint: a TFA model for policing could be a really really bad idea! TFA gives "elite" grads a crash course over the summer in teaching instruction and then throws them into the high poverty areas. Failures in teaching are relatively low profile, while an analogous policing failure would be all over the news. It's pretty easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story. And policing probably relies a bit more on camaraderie than teaching does (not that teaching doesn't, but you're not in a classroom with another teacher all day long). What happens when the existing police officers start hanging the PFA kids out to dry? Again, pretty easy to imagine.
I don’t find it “easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad shooting a minority at a traffic stop”—instead, I find it very hard to believe any Yale grad would touch such a program with a ten foot pole. It’s one thing to get idealistic young people to try teaching, which means interacting with children—most people like kids—and quite another to get them to volunteer for the “mean streets” interacting with possible criminals. Policing is seen (unfortunately) as a job for tough guys, working class military veterans, maybe someone with an associate’s degree in criminal justice. I think a more promising path may be to recruit among working class minorities coming out of high school, offer them free college in exchange for going into policing, somewhat like we do with military recruiting.
Realistically, a program like this would be aiming for grads of Regional State University, not Yale. Which is fine. For Teach for America, to make a difference you needed to attract grads of prestigious schools, as the baseline teacher *already* goes to RSU. But for police, RSU grads would represent just as large an improvement over baseline.
If Ivy League schools can have ROTC (and they do), I don't see why they can't have a few prospective police officers.
Just like ROTC, at least a few Ivy League kids would choose this program because they think it would look good for their future electoral career.
I think you’re all over-stereotyping them! Sure there are a bunch who are like that (and you see some of them down the line in the public eye creating this misimpression), but there are so so many more who have no such plans or ambitions whatsoever. Ivy League schools are part of real life, not some school version of “succession” or what have you.
Not only is the military held in higher esteem than the police -- cops don't get to board airplanes early -- but going into the armed forces as an officer after ROTC is just more prestigious than starting as a rookie cop.
I think you’re over generalizing about Ivy League students. Some of them would be open to it. At the same time however, there is no particular mystique about them, and I don’t think they’re likely to do a better or worse job than candidates from other selective colleges.
Actually I don't think this would have a lot of appeal to students at Whatever State U, either, unless they were the sort (the rare sort) already interested in police work. It's not a stretch to get liberal arts grads interested in teaching, it's a huge stretch to bring them over to law enforcement. BTW, I think we very much need to get people who wouldn't normally think of entering law enforcement to consider it as a career if we are ever to have serious reform away from the current paramilitary model.
Progress creates new problems. One great thing that has continually improved for people is we have more career options. But the downside is it does lead to significant personality segregation by profession.
Both conservatives and liberals have organically self-segregated into certain professions. And I don't think this is a great development.
I agree with you on who this program should target. But the program would have to do an exceptional job, as the military usually has, of turning knuckleheads into decent, accountable young people.
"It's pretty easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story."
Now I'm picturing Milan as Dirty Harry:
I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Now to tell you the truth, I've forgotten myself in all this excitement. So I prepared a graphic visualization displaying information from the area's "Shot Spotter" system and it clearly shows only five shots whose audio signature matched that of a .44 Magnum in the past 24 hours, so you've gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel like I have sufficient data to make an informed decision?" Well, do ya', punk?
If only Substack allowed a "tears of laughter" response emoji... 😂
Best comment I have read in a long time!
“a crash course over the summer in teaching instruction”
Is this very different from the status quo of police academies?
“What happens when the existing police officers start hanging the PFA kids out to dry?”
This is a scary problem with the idea, I agree. But as far as I can tell, “the biggest problem with police reform is the police staff” is a problem for every other potential avenue of change, too.
No disagreement from me on this. My point (which could've used more articulation) is that TFA's strategy is centered around good publicity and having their alums in positions of influence. It's savvy for sure, but there's still a lot of contention about outcomes which Matt glosses over a bit. All of the issues with TFA would be magnified in a policing model, where the employees carry guns and all of the existing employees would be significantly more hostile to being "disrupted."
And to briefly defend existing police officers a bit. The cultural animosity is a two way street.
I'm equally concerned the UCLA grad will say talking to the Walgreens cashier about a shoplifter is beneath me. The dumb brutes can do it as I should be focusing on the cognitively demanding police tasks that are too complicated for you.
I think the better opportunity is figuring out how to diversify police forces. The attraction of policing is it’s a relatively high paying job for someone without educational credentials, and it’s culturally attractive to do it in certain circles. Interestingly even high crime cities like Detroit with diverse police forces seemed to weather 2020 much better than lower crime cities policed entirely by white exurban Trump voters (Minneapolis).
Also like it or not, affluent suburbanite parents think of policing as dangerous even if they might be liberal police critics. They won’t let their kids become police.
Is diversity really the panacea though? Wasn’t everyone involved in the Freddie Gray situation Black?
Not a panacea but I think it’s the absolute minimum for any chance at success. As someone who has lived in both NYC and Minneapolis, the relatively diverse NYPD isn’t perfect but at least seemed somewhat respected. Minneapolis PD (composed almost entirely of exurban white Trump voters) is hated by everyone who lives in the city. And while murders in NYC increased in 2021, they lost about a decade of progress while Minneapolis had record murder rates
I’d agree with that. I recently moved from Atlanta which also had a pretty diverse police force, and I do think it helps.
"even high crime cities like Detroit with diverse police forces seemed to weather 2020 much better than lower crime cities policed"
There's a very simple explanation for this - most of the energy for disruptive protests and clashes with police came from white liberal media bubbles. If you look up maps of where BLM protests happened, it tracks big city progressive of whatever race, not % population of Black people or other minorities.
A city like Detroit has relatively few liberal progressive. Very progressive, very white cities like Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis did way worse than cities like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas or New Orleans. And the existing racial polarization of the South (whites there vote way more for the GOP) means that whites on those police forces would have been much more Trump-voting than whites on the Minneapolis police force.
Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis have pretty similar demographic histories that I think explain some of the similarly dysfunctional situations in the three. (Boston is a pretty blue city and didn't have a CHAZ) It'd be fun to read a longer article exploring that.
Good point. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that it's a deterministic relationship. there are many local factors and some randomness - Ferguson isn't a White Liberal bastion either.
But still, I do think it's the trend. In earlier eras of racial unrest the flash points where majority Black areas like urban Detroit and Cleveland, Watts and South Central LA etc...
But the flash points in this round were more often places like Kenosha. There were no riots that I'm aware of and relatively few protests in Mobile, Selma or New Orleans, and I think that really says something about where the outrage was coming from.
How does Philly track this? Its demographics are more like NYC than Minneapolis but the results seem closer to the latter at the moment.
We're obviously no Portland, and our police force is much more "homegrown" than in Minneapolis, but it seems that we have generated the same problem as those two: a significant fraction of our police force is unwilling to do its job (the occupying army fanboys), another significant fraction feels unable (the ones who feel no one has their back on dirty necessities), and the remainder are too exhausted (the ones who are trying anyway).
Our current dirt-bike and ATV fiasco is pretty indicative: these idiots have killed 2 pedestrians YTD, and apparently last year killed 5-6. But it's approaching 100% certain that any measures able to get them off the street will cause at least some to suffer severe and potentially lethal accidents, and the police clearly have *no* confidence that that reality is well-understood by the citizenry, the city government, or the DA's office.
So they're left to continue endangering themselves and others, because no one will tolerate the very marginal uptick in danger which would occur if we made a real effort to bring them to heel.
I suspect the endgame, in a few years' time, when everyone is well and truly sick of this, will be that an Adams-esque mayoral candidate comes to office on a platform of "I don't care if a few of them get killed, we're getting them off the streets permanently."
Hopefully that person turns out to be less of a lazy, loafer-type than Adams himself.
I dunno. Philly actually crossed my mind as I was writing my prior comment because it seemed like a particularly dysfunctional outlier, and I don't even know where to place it on the spectrum of liberal or bad police relations. But it's a city I'm fairly oblivious to and (no offense) I've actively avoided my entire life, lol.
What is going on there with ATVs? Who is riding them? Cops or citizens? I came across something a little similar that might be happening in LA, in this video the tour guide to Compton says they get 500-1000 friends together and ride motorbikes and call it a "takeover" and he says the police used to pull them over and "bother them and take their shit" but now they do nothing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CM0_is3Gfg&t=223s
Lol, your entire life was spent between a 5-hour drive and a 5-hour plane trip away, did it really require significant active avoidance?
I didn't set foot in Pittsburgh until a few years ago, and I'm in my 30's.
Anywho, it's pretty much as you describe in LA; bunch of people decide to be stupid together and the city government lacks any willingness to enforce the law, so lots of them get hurt and occasionally they manage to kill someone else.
Maybe I'm still just butthurt that UPenn rejected me, I haha
it seems like I'm some places at least at least an associates degree is required. has been for years in Montgomery County MD
"The attraction of policing is it’s a relatively high paying job for someone without educational credentials..."
I think that this is highly dependent on location.
Outside of bigger cities, police are generally paid pretty poorly. Even in comparison with a lot of non-college-educated people.
Maybe diversifying police departments (forcibly via quotas?) would be more effective than MY's idea. Maybe.
But I think MY's idea would be relatively easy for the public to swallow. If we go the diversity-quota route, prepare to wait decades for widespread implementation.
(And that pessimism is based on public opinion alone. Another bottleneck might be a lack of non-white jobseekers.)
Many police departments have had racial quotas for decades. Here's an AP story on Cincinatti ending its racial quotas in 2021 after 40 years in place:
https://apnews.com/article/business-police-courts-ohio-discrimination-4ddb3349ae089adb23f38b8adce82bf6
I don't know that the average person, of any race, cares about these kinds of issues as much as the average liberal does, though. Are you more worried about getting pulled over by a Black or Hispanic or Asian cop than a White one? I'm not. I know plenty of people do think that way, but it's not a habit of thought that should be encouraged since it's relatively low down the scale of things that can impact an interaction with a police officer.
Assuming we actually train these kids the same way we do other police (which is, yes, too short, but that's obviously where we would start):
I would assume that the narrative for "20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story" would look almost identical to how it does today with any police, if it happens in the first year. But the whole point of the exercise, at least from my perspective, is to pierce the bubble in which the chattering classes exist when it comes to policing.
If the program survives, what happens in 10 or 20 years when most college graduates know someone who went and did police work for 2-3 years and a third know someone who made it into a life-long career/vocation, like is currently true for TFA? Can the university-educated core of the progressive movement maintain its current delusions about the nature of police work in the US and the value it does/doesn't bring to society?
I'd guess no.
I actually think progressives learning more about policing first-hand would be a great benefit to our coalition.
A lot of progressives view police officers the way conservatives view academics: through a distorted lens.
Since both are extremely under-represented, non-particularly interested in it, and pre-disposed to view them negatively, absurd stereotypes flourish.
I've met a lot of normal liberals who call police forces stormtroopers and if you're actually familiar with Nazi troopers that is no less outlandish than conservatives who call academics Leninists/.
Coming at this from a San Francisco perspective, I don't see how this would solve my city's problems.
We have a crime and homelessness problem because:
- the city (and state) chooses not to prosecute most small-ish theft
- drug use isn't prosecuted
As a result, people come to SF from around the country because the weather is nice and they can live in a tent, steal small things for money, and use that cash for drugs, all with relatively little trouble.
I don't think the situation is bad because the cops aren't smart enough.
It's the politicians and policy-makers not understanding the consequences of what they're doing.
I thought the idea that homeless people come from all over the country to California because of the weather and liberal values has been mostly debunked. Instead, most homeless people come from the communities where they live and the main driver is high housing costs.
From what I know, the "it's debunked" view is more correct on the regional level. So you might be right about California as a whole.
But on the more local level, local policies and policing are much more impactful. It's self-evident that the 5,000 people on LA's skid row, for example, originally came from somewhere else, even if that somewhere is just somewhere in LA.
So why are they concentrated there and not somewhere else in LA? That's where the local policies come in. SF is a much smaller city than LA and has policies that concentrate the high-crime homeless locally.
So you're right, most probably didn't come from Ohio to smash windows in Haight-Ashbury. But David R's reasons are good explanations for why so many disruptive homeless live in SF and not in Mountain View or Victorville.
I think it’s pretty natural that homeless people within a metro area would congregate in dense urban environments in which services, public transit, etc are available and not in sparsely populated suburbs where there’s no foot traffic, few buses, and few public amenities. So that may explain more why homeless people congregate more in downtown SD than in La Jolla, or in Miami than in Palm Beach, or in SF rather than Mountain View.
Sure but, at least in the areas I'm familiar with (Los Angeles, for example) the homeless will sometimes be forcibly removed from a less tolerant area and bussed to a more tolerant area. All the things about amenities can be true, also, but those big sweeps are pretty massive needle-movers.
Just as an anecdote on the off-chance that you're familiar with the area, but Pasadena, CA, had plenty of homeless services when I lived there, but the small number of homeless were fairly off-the-radar. If I was homeless I'd far prefer there to the jungles of skid row or East Hollywood, but the latter places are where they ended up.
I think the high-housing costs thing had been debunked. At least you may be talking about 2 different populations. The vast majority of people shitting on the sidewalk and committing petty thefts are mentally I’ll and/or are chronic drug users who aren’t able to hold down jobs or pay rent...there is a subset of people between jobs / living in their cars / temporarily down on their luck affected by high housing costs...the temporarily homeless crowd. But they’re a small share of the overall numbers.
And when it comes to housing costs - policies in my state (OR) are so unfriendly to landlords, it’s no surprise there’s a housing shortage. If you have no recourse against tenants who are a high risk for not paying rent or damaging your property, you’re not going to take on renters.
It would be good if people claiming things have been debunked cited some data, otherwise you get situations like this where two people with opposing views both claim the other's have been debunked.
Fair enough.
on this particular issue, briross is right, the literature is pretty clear
On the contrary, the link between housing costs and homelessness has been effectively proven, not "debunked".
https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
Scott Alexander had a pretty good/fair take on "Homelessness Isn’t Just About Housing" claims in his review of San Fransicko.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko
"... San Francisco’s mild climate alone can’t explain why it has more homeless people per capita than Miami or Houston. But as the graph above shows, housing prices do explain about 75% of the difference between SF and those two cities. "
Drug use and mental health problems are both a cause and effect of homelessness. Most of the country has seen a decline in homelessness over the last ten years. Every place that has seen an increase is a place where housing costs have skyrocketed. Seems like an open and shut case to me.
The correlation seems muddy to me. When I look at housing cost curves, they look almost identical in SF, Portland, Las Vegas, Houston, eg - yet only Portland and San Francisco have seen increases . Then a city with (relatively) modest housing price growth like Albuquerque has seen their homeless population triple in the last 2 years.
Subsidized housing will definitely help a portion of people...I just think it’s a multidimensional problem. Eg here’s a complicated factor: eviction moratoriums put in place for the pandemic are now expiring, causing homeless numbers to spike in some places... that’s bad in the short term, but probably *good* in the long term as it will encourage property owners and investors to put more property up for rent.
Houston appears to have tackled homelessness in a more direct way than those other cities and is an outlier. Nevada on the other hand has had one of the most rapid growths in homelessness in the country. They might do more to kick people out of Vegas, but all that does is shuffle them to other nearby areas.
*Mentally ill - not mentally i’ll - 🙄
Since we were talking about the police/maintaining the peace - I was referring specifically to the vast majority of shoplifters and sidewalk shitters as being addicts/mentally ill. Not necessarily the vast majority of all homeless.
And your study mentions mentally ill - not sure if it includes drug and alcohol addiction.
The ‘housing cost’ argument is fine - it doesn’t help to have a lack of cheap housing. But focusing on housing to the exclusion of other factors - which the ‘housing first’ crowd seems to want to do - seems like a dodge... they want me to believe that the median homeless person is just an average stable person who couldn’t afford rent...so instead of crashing on a friends couch or moving to a cheaper town or getting a roommate, they decided to live in a trash heap in the park and crap on your front porch and scream nonsense at passers-by...No, I don’t think so.
Homelessness is a function of housing prices AND mental Illness and addiction and local policy enforcement (or lack thereof) and climate and lack of a safety net and probably some other stuff...
FWIW - in 2019 the San Francisco health department estimated that 50% of their homeless population (sheltered and unsheltered) suffered from BOTH mental health and substance abuse issues, with another 5-10% being either/or. Below is a 2019 LA Times article and attached UCLA study saying incidence of addiction and mental illness among LA’s homeless population is between 70% and 80%. They touch on reasons why numbers are often understated (self-reporting is unreliable, flaws in how govt collects data - a common source for researchers, and the bias of homeless advocates to de-emphasize anything that takes away from the homeless-as-victim narrative.) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless-population-mental-illness-disability
But I’m with you - let’s subsidize housing, but let’s also not pretend mental illness and addiction aren’t major factors too. And let’s not pretend we can solve the problem without 1) rebuilding mental health facilities and services 2) funding more addiction services, AND just as important 3) expecting that slice of addicted/mentally ill recipients of subsidized housing - whether it’s 25% or 80% - to seek and maintain treatment for their issues and 4) not tolerating city destroying behavior - whether you’re homeless or homeful - you get arrested if you shit/shoot up on the sidewalk, threaten people/behave violently, steal things, disturb the peace, etc. It’s not ‘housing first’ - it’s more like an ‘all of the above’ approach.
The Seattle Times has a series on homelessness and in one of their articles, they mentioned that about 30% of all the homeless people living on the street have hoarding disorder, which partly explains why there are often giant piles of trash next to a homeless person's tent. I don't know if it's usually considered a serious mental illness, but that's an incredibly high rate just for one mental illness.
Having hoarding disorder also makes it difficult for a person to move into subsidized housing because they may not be able to bring all their stuff with them, but it also means they're more likely to get evicted over safety issues. They may also leave housing because they accumulate more stuff than they can keep. Homeless people with hoarding disorder probably need much more than just housing. On the other hand, housing first probably solves the problem for a lot homeless single mothers.
I agree almost completely. I say almost because I think housing is the primary cause of homelessness. The correlation between prices and rate of homelessness is just too high for it to be otherwise.
But drug addiction, anti-social behavior and mental illness are exacerbating factors and it's tiresome when otherwise sharp writers and analysts like Yglesias pretend like they are not a part of the equation.
But what is the % breakdown of mentally ill between the highly visible "public nuisance" homeless and quietly struggling borderline-invisible homeless?
There are a lot of "invisible" homeless -- folks who lost their job, can't make the rent, and are living in their cars or crashing on couches. These folks aren't a crime problem. The visible homeless, the ones hanging out on the street, I argue are much more likely to be mentally ill or have drug problems.
The study you cite notes this and, I might add, says that the 25% is "at a minimum" and that 45% had some level of mental illness.
Sorry to read about your troubles & glad that things now seem back on track.
I have become increasingly skeptical of the research around homelessness, particularly around people who are visibly homeless in many cases the research is clearly partisan or the conclusions are obviously absurd.
For instance, here in Seattle we were assured that homeless encampments absolutely did not lead to more crime and anyone who believes that is watching too much Sinclair media. Then the city released data on 911 calls. Almost 1/5 calls for guns shots/someone shot were related to homeless encampments.
My best guess is that this research is being conducted by people with a partisan agenda.
I regularly read the homicide report feature from the LA Times. No reason other than I'm very interested in crime and I guess I'm just a morbid guy. Homeless people are a hugely disprorportionate source of both victims and perpetrators in LA
What's weird is that activists who claim to care about homeless people wave aside the crime problem. If they really want to improve the lives of people in these encampments, an important place to start is to reduce the amount of crime, particularly violent crime in these encampments.
If the cost of housing drove people onto the street, why would you choose to live on the sidewalk in an expensive neighborhood in SF when apartments that are less than 1/2 the price are available a bus ride away?
How many middle-class people have tolerated 1-hour commutes in order to get a cheaper place?
When you see someone on the street, do you think it's because they decided "This is better than the bus ride"?
When you get kicked out of your rental because you don't have the money to pay rent then you also don't have the money for first and last months rent somewhere else. Homeless people live near where they can get services (like a mission) or near transit centers that can move them around. If you are actually curious (instead of just wanting to one-up people on the internet) you can read lots of articles that describe how people become homeless and how they get by once that happens. There is no one reason that people become homeless, it's always a bunch of reasons. Most grew up around abuse and drugs, but nowhere near all of them. Many have mental health disorders, but not all of them. It's a complex problem that requires complex solutions, but it's been proven beyond reasonable doubt by lots of different economists that high housing costs make the problem much worse. Matt has written on the subject many times, feel free to go back and read them.
There are definitely some homeless people that move around the country, and who choose to go to California for the weather. But there are plenty of places with great weather that have declining homeless populations, and one the biggest explosions in homelessness has been in NYC which obviously does not have great weather at all. So yes, this is all about housing costs. But I would be careful about saying that homeless people don't move to California.
Here’s some data from LA County.
https://documents.lahsa.org/Planning/homelesscount/2016/factsheet/2016-HC-Results.pdf
Among homeless people >24 years old, 70% have lived in LA county over 20 years, with only around 6% having arrived within the past year. 70% were last stably housed in LA county with another 10% last being stable housed elsewhere in California.
Among homeless youths (age 18 to 24), there is a greater proportion of recent transplants. However, still 67% were last stably housed in LA County, and still more elsewhere in California.
We don’t know what percentage of homeless transplants moved there for the weather. And sure it does seem that some wanderers do indeed exist, but they are by no means the majority of even major drivers of homelessness in LA.
However, what is clear is that homelessness in California is not primarily driven by transplants moving there, whether for the weather or for liberal policies or any other reason. Granted this doesn’t explain dynamics within different areas within LA county…
Interesting.
A couple of other dimensions that I would be curious about in terms of their impact behind the scenes - 1) it’s hard to get a good picture of state-by-state changes to the various safety nets that keep people afloat...be it housing subsidies, beds at inpatient psychiatric facilities, welfare, drug treatment programs etc. If people teetering on the edge lose access to food stamps, or some other support service they had formerly relied on, that could send them into a spiral that leads to the street. 2) changes in drug environment - the advent of fentanyl, oxy, spread of meth, the loosening of drug laws, the stand-down by police after George Floyd etc
This is my understanding as well.
I'm perhaps the most intense criminal justice reform person I know, but the "stand around and watch the guy ransacking the CVS" thing is the most derangedly stupid shit I've ever seen. No functional version of the state can allow that.
This sounds like the same attitude you usually hear from hard-left folks: "If you're not going to solve Problem X completely, then I'm not interested in making things somewhat better. The only acceptable solution is to adopt my entire worldview on this."
Perhaps a progressive cohort that gets involved more in every day policing would be able to convince other reformers to take a more realistic stance on those policy issues. That is why Matt made the point about how TFA experience shifts the views of reformers.
I was about to make a similar comment. A knock-on effect would ideally involve changing the progressive consensus around what the realities on the ground are as well as realistic solutions.
Maybe the housing costs make policing in SF a really shitty job choice.
Agree, but the crime and homelessness problem in San Francisco is a totally different beast than, say, violent crime in Oakland.
> I don't think the situation is bad because the cops aren't smart enough.
Do you think it might be bad because the smarts aren't cop enough?
This could help with that too
What's the evidence those two things are the causes of crime and homelessness? I'm skeptical.
It seems plausible that not prosecuting shoplifting and drug use is the explanation for a surge in shoplifting and drug use. It seems less plausible that it would be behind a rise in other crimes.
And to add as a bleeding heart, the existence of the punishment matters much more than the harshness of the punishment.
The SF shoplifting problem, which as someone who lives here is subjectively a major problem from my perspective, is primarily due to total non-enforcementy.
I agree with David R that Matt's proposal doesn't target the problems in SF. But it seems to me the problems David is raising are basically policy and public health problems, not policing problems.
So long as Matt's proposal doesn't have negative impact on the homeless/drug/mental illness issues in SF (which it doesn't seem to), I don't think the fact that it doesn't address those problems is a flaw.